Happiness is a choice

I know I told some of you that my next post would be about gun control, (it’s almost ready) but I feel this topic is more important: Happiness is a choice.

I’ve alluded to this in some of my other posts, but never really explained it. It’s all about perspective and choices. All of life is really. I’ve seen some of the most downtrodden people look around and smile. Some people are in so much pain and could die any day, and yet they smile at people around them.

How can people do that? Speaking from my own experiences, when the world knocks you down, you have two choices: get back up or roll over and cry about it. You can spend all your energy bitching about it, hoping things miraculously get better, or you can spend that energy moving forward and make the most of what you have.

If you’re one of the first, I wish you well, but your problem isn’t going to go away until you confront it. It might be scary, it might be hard, but the best things in life are hard, and you learn more from them than anything else. “That’s just not fair!” Who told you that life was fair?

If you’re one of the other ones, find other people like you that want to make things better and encourage one another. Part of the reason for starting this blog site was to have a way to vent. The other part is to help encourage, inspire, and maybe educate others that are trying to become better people. I’ve had various jobs over the years, but the thing that matters most is that I try to be my best at whatever I do.

When people are young, they are making some of the most important decisions they will ever make in their lives. They will decide how important people are to them. They will decide how important material things are to them. (Things like brand names, types of shoes or clothing, and cars) This is also the time when they decide to be introverts or extroverts, honest it dishonest, kind or mean, loving or hateful.

What kind of people you allow in your life is a choice. What kind of profession you like or want to be is a choice. Everything in life is a choice, and all these choices help determine what makes you happy. Therefore, happiness is a choice.

Knowing this makes a huge impact on your life. Once you start to realize that your attitude towards life helps to determine your level of happiness, you can make other decisions that change your perspective. Perspective is everything. If you grew up never having seen poverty, and you made less than everyone you know, you might feel badly about that. If you made less than everyone in a nice neighborhood, you would probably feel differently about that, especially if you’d ever known poverty.

That’s why you need to make better decisions, so that you are happier with how things in your life turn out.